Dwight Ericsson ... expressed my own feelings beautifully. I have never been able to picture the Lord
Jesus Christ in the execution room or at the gallows
giving his approval. As Mr. Ericsson so vividly points
out, our entire prison system, with very few exceptions,
is completely foreign to the spirit and teachings of
Jesus Christ. A dead man can never be saved but a
living sinner (aren't we all?) under restraint is always
a potential child of God.

Floyd Rawlings
Monmouth, Illinois

Ericsson's paper in the Journal (Sep. 1962), is extremely interesting. He begins by a
wonderful ad bomi
nem
device which attempts to equate what all Christians
believe, namely, that our Lord and the writers of Scripture intended that they be taken seriously and that their
writings mark a radical break with the past, with the
particular view that he espouses, namely, that Jesus
abolished the Old Testament law code. Has Ericsson
never read: "Think not that I am come to destroy the
law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to
fulfill" (Mat. 5:17) and the succeeding verses? How
this supports his view that Jesus came to abolish the
law I do not see.

Again, Ericsson says that love can do no wrong, referring us to Mark 3:1-6. Unfortunately, it takes eisegesis to bring love into die picture, for the only emotions mentioned in the passage are anger and grief.
As for the violation of a statute, the only statute which
our Lord violated was one of the many devised by man,
one of the type that Christ condemned for making the
Law of God void. See Mark 7:13. Further, God is
love, not has become love; yet He has repeatedly condemned men without opportunity for repentance, from
Abiram's family and associates (Numbers 16:31-35)
to Ananias and his wife (Acts 5:1-10).

Ericsson continues by trying to prove that man has
no restraints in his relationship to God except his own
conscience. But how can he overlook such passages as
" . . . I command, yet not I, but the Lord . . ." (I
Corinthians 7:10; see also I Thessalonians 4:11; 11
Thessalonians 3:4, 6, 10, 12; 1 Timothy 4:11) ? It is not
especially useful to continue a point by point consideration of the Scriptural "evidence" collected to back up
his views. It should already be obvious that Ericsson has
taken a position and has made Scripture conform to his
position, rather than the reverse. But a human procrusteanizing is always at fault,

Besides the faulty exegesis, Ericsson has failed to
prove his point by being unaware of a difference between the act of an individual Christian, who is to
forgive, to suffer wrong silently, to return good for
evil; and the judicial act which is necessary for the welfare of society and the state. Let us imagine that the
individual's rules were applied in dealing with criminals. The arresting officers could be
expected to greet
a robbery suspect with, "You
got W
in that holdup:
here is another forty," for this applies Matthew 5:40
41 to the situation. And to the mutdair, the officer
should say: "This is only your 437th corpse. We must
forgive you 490 times," for this applies Matibew 18:2122.

I have been reading with interest the discussion on capital punishinent by Pj&Lrd Buk Dwight
Ericsson,
and others in recent issues of this loomd. As an avid
reader of JASA, I am pleased to see controversial issues
being thrashed out in its pages in such a stimulating
manner; no doubt many of us are tempted to join in
the controversy merely because it is stimulating, in spite
of the fact that we have done little reading or careful
thinking in this field. This is a case in which the most
helpful contribution I can make is to refrain from
comment.

However, as Book Review Editor, I have recently
received a pamphlet by John Howard Yoder entitled
The Christian and Capital Punishment (Institute of
Mennonite Studies, Series No. 1; Faith and Life Press,
Newton, Kansas, 1961. 24 pp., paper, 50c) to which
I would like to refer others interested in this problem.
Yoder believes that Christians should work to abolish
the death penalty and therefore sides with Ericsson.
His arguments include those already brought into the
discussion, such as the failure of the death penalty to
serve as a real deterrent to serious crime and the
fallibility of penal institutions, but I feel that his
discussion of Christian morality within society introduces some new ideas and that his discussion of the
significance of the Old Testament passages in question
goes to greater depth.

Yoder points out that one of the indirect influences
of Christianity on modern society has been progressive
limitation of killing by the state (apart from the problem of war). Thus, "distinctions are now made between
die insane and the legally responsible; between accidental manslaughter, self-defense, and premeditated
murder. It has come to be recognized that all of
society bears some of the blame for the situations of
conflict, the temptations, and the weaknesses of personality which result in killing. Faced with this development, the friends of the 'moral order' theory of capital
punishment must, it would seem, choose one of o
answers: either they may stand by the claim that 'a life
is a life,' rejecting all such considerations; or they must claim that there is one dear and sure way of calculating
the exact degree of blameworthiness, so that what the
moral order calls for by way of punishment is always
definite and easy to agree upon. But in the latter case
it must be admitted that today capital punishment in
law and practice cannot be any nearer to this ideal
moral order than its abolition would be, for no two
states or nations are alike in the use and severity of
punishment."

With reference to such Old Testament passages as
Gen. 9:5-6, Yoder points out that the death penalty
as stated there is not so much a
requirement
as a
limitation.
It is spoken against a background of a story
of corruption in which vengeance was die general pattern, In Gen. 4:23 we read Lamech's vicious boast, "I
have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for
striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly
Lamech seventy-seven fold." The Bible is realistic-vengeance does not have to be commanded; it happens.
The hostility of man tends to make vengeance rise out
of proportion to the offense. "Thus the significance of
civil order is that it
limits
vengeance to a level equivalent to the offense. In this sense it is one way in which
God's grace works against sin. The first murder recorded in Genesis was followed by an act of God protecting
the murderer's life against those who could be expected
to threaten him (Gen. 4:15)." The life-for-a-life rule
is given for limitation of punishment and, furthermore,
the authorization of killing in the Old Testament is
always more from a sacrificial than a legal or moral
point of view since, after all, the death penalty for
oxen guilty of murder was also called for in Gen. 9:5.
"Since then the death penalty in the Old Testament is
expiation, rather than penalty, its antitype in the New
Testament is not the sword of the magistrate, but the
cross." Yoder's discussion of the pertinent New Testament passages, such as Romans 13, carries this idea
further.

While this controversy has been going on in our
journal,
I was approached by a colleague requesting
my signature on a petition to the governor of Iowa
to commute the death sentence of a convicted murderer,
circulated by "Iowans Against the Death Penalty." After
thinking about both sides of the controversy and praying
about my own convictions in the matter, I signed the
petition.

Walter R. Hearn
Ames, Iowa

I was happy to see Richard Bube's further remarks
on capital punishment in the last issue of the JASA.
Truth is not the sole possession of any of us (even
though we often write as though it were) and it is
usually only after a thorough discussion of all sides
of a question that we are able to approach the truth.
I would like to make a few comments on the points
he raised, hoping they will shed a little more light on a
complex problem.

1.
1 agree fully that the New Testament is "solidly rooted in Old Testament Judaism." Indeed, the New
Testament is incomprehensible apart from the Old.
Nevertheless, I am a Christian, not a Jew, and when
the New Testament seems to take a different position
than does the Old, then I must abandon the Old Covenant for the New. As is quite evident from Bube's
article (JASA, 13:114-116, Dec. 1961), he who would
defend capital punishment will find scant support for
it in the New Testament and must base his argument
almost exclusively on the negative proposition that a
law given in the Old Testament has not been revoked
by the New.

2. 1 can only place Mat. 5:38-39 and Lev. 24:19-20
side by side and ask the reader whether or not he can
honestly find any other interpretation than that Jesus
intended to repudiate the lex talionis:

Ye have heard that it hath
And if a man cause a blem-
been said, An eye for an eye,
ish in his neighbor; as he
and a tooth for a tooth: But
hath done, so shall it be done
I say unto you, That ye resist
to him; breach for breach, eye
not evil; but whosoever shall
for eye, tooth for tooth; as
smite thee on thy right check,
he hath caused a blemish in a
turn to him the other also.
man, so shall it be done to
him again. (Cf. Ex.
21:22-25;
Deut.
19:21.)

3. It seems to me that we are quite often unable to
account for every piece of data when we put forward
a thesis. The physical scientist would publish very little
if he were required to account for every last detail of
the phenomena with which he deals. If the data are
abstract, the problem is all the greater. When one deals
with abstract concepts which have originated in the
mind of God, he must expect that harmonization will
sometimes be impossible. Numerous illustrations might
be cited: What of the "binding" and "loosing" of
Mat. 16:19, or the baptismal regeneration implicit in
the "repent and be baptized" of Acts 2:37? The many
explanations I have heard of these and other problem
passages really serve only to show how deeply embarrassed the expositor is to find such passages in Scripture. I readily admit that the "revenger" of Rom. 13:4
and the "punishment" of I Pet. 2:14 present problems
for my scheme, but I feel that the "forgive" of Mat.
6:14-15 and the "love" of Rom. 13:8 offer at least as
much difficulty to Bube's scheme.

4. The warning concerning the "predestinating influence of God" is well taken. I would inject the caution, however, that no man knows for certain what it is
to which any given individual has been predestined by
God. The man who ventures to apply an absolute punishment to one of his fellow men is under obligation to
be absolutely certain that the punishment he applies
is the one God intended, a condition, I would suggest,
which it is impossible to fulfill.

5. 1 approach Bube's final point somewhat cautiously
due to my own lack of background in this area, but
perhaps I can offer some ideas which someone else
might be able to develop more adequately than I can.
What is the character of the difference between the
functions of the individual and of the state? The New
Testament often speaks of a judgment to come upon
individuals, but never of a judgment to come upon
states. The reason for this must be that the state is
only the corporate expression of individual wills. When
a state does good or evil, reward or punishment is
measured out to the individuals who guided the state
into good or evil, not to the state. The state does not
even exist apart from the people who make it up, or at
least apart from the people who guide its course.

I doubt if a state has any function which is not, at
least in theory, the possession of every franchised citizen of that state. Note, for instance, that in a moment
of extreme danger to life, our laws allow the individual
the right to execute "capital punishment" upon an
armed intruder in his house, although normally the
state reserves such functions to itself. I cannot believe
that the state is granted the privilege of doing things
which are absolutely wrong for the individual, for the
franchised individual is the state. The state only exercises certain of the individual's rights on his behalf.
If capital punishment is absolutely wrong for the individual, then it cannot be right for the state just because the state is an impersonal body.

Dwight E. Ericsson
Frederick College, Portsmouth, Virginia
Editorial Comment:
With these letters, the first two
of which were written prior to distribution of the December issue, we close off our discussions of capital
punishment-at least until such time as totally new
types of evidence (such as a summary of pertinent
criminological, philological, semantic, or other studies)
are brought to bear upon the subject of Christian norms.
Readers will discover that the quotations on "original
sin" in the NEWS AND NOTES section of this issue
are pertinent to certain phases of this discussion.D. 0. M.